Baking Day: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcake

I have foregone baking in search of easier hobbies:  running, shopping, reading and blogging.

But there are days when I feel so displaced, my thoughts so astray that I know nothing else can calm me, nothing can help me put things in perspective than  a session of baking therapy.

So one saturday I fought off laziness and brought out my old baking tools.  I chose to make cupcakes because cupcakes are a forgiving lot, and having not baked for months,  I was scared of how unfit I was to attempt baking.

But ordinary cupcakes are a bit too boring.  I needed something that had a twist to it, something I can look forward to.  Not that there´s anything wrong with a vanilla cupcake.  But  this is a baking therapy session, an act of creation,  balm to my crazy thoughts.  I need something more exacting, with a bit more pizzaz.

And so when I stumbled upon this crazy  cookie-dough-in-a-cupcake recipe and read the  five star reviews, I knew that this was the one.

The Original Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcake Recipe

I will not post the entire recipe here because I essentially followed the recipe above.  Instead, here are the must-do´s to make this recipe work for you:

1.  Make the choco chip cookie dough a day ahead.  I made my cookie dough on a Friday afternoon, made  them into balls  and stuck them to the refrigerator. This step does two things,  your dough becomes easier to handle, it becomes firmer and gives you that amazing cookie dough texture when you bite into your cupcake. Second,  cookie dough is delicious! Yes they have raw egg, but that does not stop me from eating through my cookie dough.  Get a cup of vanilla ice cream, plonk in a ball or two of your cookie dough and you´ve got a delicious cookie dough ice cream a la Ben and Jerry´s.

2. The original recipe advises using a baking mix for your cupcake recipe.  But if you are like me and hate baking from mixes,  here´s the cupcake recipe I used:   Smitten Kitchen´s  Basic Cup Cake Recipe
But feel free to use your own cake recipe.  Next time I think I´d try using a chocolate cupcake base so that when one bites into the chocolate cupcake, there would be that awesome color contrast between the  cookie dough center and the chocolate cupcake base.  Or here are other ideas:  red velvet cupcake or a slightly tart lemon cupcake would also do well with that chocochip cookie dough center.

3.  I don´t have a proper frosting piping bag in Madrid so I just slapped on buttercream frosting using a small rubber scraper.  As you can see these are not the daintiest cupcakes, but they do taste delicious!

I now have enough cupcakes for a whole week´s breakfast.  I am sure it will make waking up each day a bit more sweeter :)  But more than that,   this short baking session  reminded me why I have for years loved the quiet joy of baking.

“There was a mood of magic and frenzy to the room. Crystalline swirls of sugar and flour still lingered in the air like kite tails. And then there was the smell-the smell of hope, the kind of smell that brought people home.”  Sarah Addison Allen on Baking